Re: Self Documenting Interfaces

["Dan Kaminsky" <effugas best com>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Per Lewau <perle@lysator.liu.se>
To: gnome-gui-list@gnome.org <gnome-gui-list@gnome.org>
Date: Friday, July 24, 1998 2:54 AM
Subject: Re: Self Documenting Interfaces


On Fri, 24 Jul 1998, Dan Kaminsky wrote:

>> I'm gonna take back my claim that voicing tours is preferable.  However,
a
>> text-annotated visual tour of a program and what it can do *IS* a good
>> thing.  There's no better way to learn an app than to watch it in use,
>> rewind, fast forward, etc.

>The best way to learn something is to do it. Provide instead of visual
>playbacks guided tours of common operations. ("...and on the right we see
>the famous Print button. By pressing that button we can produce hardcopies
>of the document" :))

>A somewhat well-known principle is that you see and forget, you hear and
>remember and you do and understand.


A better known principal is documentation makes no sense.

I can come up with any number of people who believe this :-)

Anyway, for documentation purposes, what you see and do, you remember.  What
you only hear and do, you totally screw up.  What you see and hear, you
remember even better.  What you read and do, you hunt around trying to find
the button the documentation says to push.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Per Lewau (perle@lysator.liu.se) Student of Computer Science at
Linköping University,
Sweden.
"Why waste time learning, when ignorance is instantaneous?"
- Hobbes


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